Cristiano Amon, president and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated, uses prestigious opening keynote to announce new partnership with Meta.
One thing was clear from Cristiano Amon’s opening keynote on Friday: In the same way that connectivity between devices is essential, partnerships are fundamental to Qualcomm and their engineering of the future. Sharing stage time with Dr Won-Joon Choi, Exec VP, Samsung and Lila Snyder, CEO, Bose Corporation, established the importance of collaboration to Qualcomm and the Snapdragon platforms. But choosing IFA Berlin to announce a multi-year agreement with Meta, Amon gave the stage to a virtual appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Meta. Speaking via video of the “deeper engineering collaboration that’s a first for both of us” Zuckerberg expanded on the need for Qualcomm’s expertise in building devices and chipset optimisation to help Meta develop the foundations of the metaverse. “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence, like you’re right there with another person or in another place. This is the holy grail of social technology, and that’s why we’re so focused on building this,” he said. “Our hope is that within the next decade the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”
While the bulk of Amon’s address covered Qualcomm and Snapdragon’s role in the convergence of mobile and PC, the seamless integration of WiFi and 5G, and the importance of AI as a cornerstone of all platforms and experiences, his overarching message was this: “We don’t do this alone. We always believe in partnerships and one of the marquee qualities of Qualcomm is the ability to partner for the long term and build a broad ecosystem.”
